New book - How Scribes Invented the Biblical Priest-King

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Secret Alias
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Re: New book - How Scribes Invented the Biblical Priest-King

Post by Secret Alias »

But Shechem was the original altar of Israel. That Jews misread the text to infer Jerusalem was that place is hardly surprising.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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MrMacSon
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Re: New book - How Scribes Invented the Biblical Priest-King

Post by MrMacSon »

Secret Alias wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2019 7:00 pm But Shechem was the original altar of Israel. That Jews misread the text to infer Jerusalem was that place is hardly surprising.

... the arguments made in the book focus...on two central theses regarding Melchizedek, with the second depending on the first.
  • The first thesis is that Melchizedek, king of Shalem, was originally king of Sodom, and that his dominion was altered deliberately to prevent the Jewish patriarch Abram from having positive interactions with the king of Sodom, whose city would soon be destroyed by God.
  • The second thesis is that Shalem was originally associated with the city of Shechem, in the shadow of Mt. Gerizim in Samaria, but later came to be associated with Jerusalem through a number of scribal and interpretative maneuvers designed to promote Jerusalem and denigrate Samaria.
Keywords: Melchizedek, Sodom, Shalem, Samaria, Shechem, Jerusalem, redaction, Mt. Gerizim, text criticism, redaction criticism

https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/ ... -chapter-1

Cargill later, in chapter 5, introduces 'evidence for a third compelling thesis': "that the Moriah mentioned in conjunction with Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac in Gen. 22 originally read Moreh, and was initially a reference to the Oak of Moreh near Shechem in the shadow of Mt. Gerizim.

"To combat this, the hapax legomenon Moriah was created to remove the central theophany from the holy Samaritan mountain, Gerizim, and later, utilizing a gloss in 2 Chron. 3:1, was relocated from the desert to Jerusalem."

Chapter 5 "systematically explores examples in the Hebrew Bible of growing redactional competition between the Masoretic Text and the Samaritan Pentateuch, with each sectarian group making slight alterations to key texts in order to promote their respective holy mountains and denigrate the others’." https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/ ... -chapter-6

Chapter 6 "presents evidence that demonstrates, in a manner similar to Moriah detailed in the previous chapter, that the city of Shalem was relocated in a two-step redactional process. First, Shalem was moved from being “a city of Shechem” (Gen. 33:18) to being located in an unknown region. In Jer. 41:5, a reference to Shalem was replaced outright with a reference to Shiloh so as to obscure its mention, but not before the LXX preserved the original reference to Shalem. Later, Shalem was associated explicitly with Jerusalem, using texts from the Second Temple period like Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and the works of Josephus. The location of the Valley of Shaveh was also relocated from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem to correspond to the relocation of Shalem to Jerusalem." https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/ ... -chapter-7
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